A lesson on the death penalty from a grieving mother in Iran

Samereh Alinejad

Vahid Salemi / Associated Press

Samereh Alinejad wipes away tears at her home while talking about her son who was killed in a street brawl in Iran. Alinejad told The Associated Press that she had felt she could never live with herself if the man who killed her son were spared from execution. But in the last moment, she pardoned him in an act that has made her a hero in her hometown, where banners in the streets praise her family's mercy.

Samereh Alinejad wipes away tears at her home while talking about her son who was killed in a street brawl in Iran. Alinejad told The Associated Press that she had felt she could never live with herself if the man who killed her son were spared from execution. But in the last moment, she pardoned him in an act that has made her a hero in her hometown, where banners in the streets praise her family's mercy. (Vahid Salemi / Associated Press)

4.1% of those sentenced to death in the U.S. are innocent, researchers say

Mike Farrell: an execution requires each of us to look the killer in the eye and kick out the chair

Iran is a death penalty machine. More than 600 people were executed there last year, according to the United Nations, many of them in public hangings before crowds filled with children.

So far this year, there have been an estimated 188 executions. That number would have been 189 had it not been for the family of Abdollah Hosseinzadeh, an 18-year-old knifed to death in a street fight seven years ago.

I feel that vengeance has left my heart.- Samereh Alinejad, an Iranian mother who forgave her son's killer

Islamic sharia law gave the young man's mother, Samereh Alinejad, the right to extract revenge by participating in the execution of the man who killed her son. As the convicted murderer stood in the gallows, a noose around his neck, she was called forward to help kick the chair out from under him and administer the ultimate punishment.

Instead, she shocked the crowd by first slapping his face and then publicly forgiving him. After her husband removed the noose, Alinejad and the killer's mother embraced, both of them sobbing. At least one of their sons had been spared.

Our fundamental choice about capital punishment doesn't get more stark than in this story, which was caught on video and went viral on the Internet and social media.

That's because for all the purported justification of capital punishment — claims of closure and discredited notions of deterrence — executions touch all of us personally. In a metaphoric sense, an execution requires each of us to look the killer in the eye and kick out the chair.

We insulate ourselves from this uncomfortable fact through distance. We assign the deed to others, minions of the state, who strap the convicted person into the electric chair or jab the needle into his or her arm.

We hide the executioner behind a screen, prohibit photos, nod our heads over media accounts as we carry on with our lives. There's a reason we give a blank bullet to the firing squad: That way, each marksman can believe his wasn't the fatal shot.

Yet there will always be something to jar us out of our denial.

On Monday, it was a statistical study published online by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Researchers examined data on exonerations and concluded that 4.1% of those sentenced to death in the United States are innocent. The researchers estimated that 340 people have been wrongly sentenced to death in America since 1973.

On Tuesday, we were again forced to consider capital punishment when a botched lethal injection in Oklahoma led to the agonizing 43-minute death of an inmate who, after being declared unconscious, began moaning and writhing until he succumbed to a massive heart attack, robbing the state of the right to say it had executed him.

Last year, it was the TV series "The Killing" that forced viewers to confront state-ordered executions. In the penultimate episode of the season, actor Peter Sarsgaard's character, a death row inmate, was executed.

When asked how he approached the part, Sarsgaard talked about the famous experiment by Stanley Milgram, who arranged for volunteers to administer increasing levels of (fake) electrical shocks, under orders from an authority figure, to a screaming victim. Milgram devised the 1961 experiment to demonstrate how common, decent people could allow something as monstrous as the Holocaust to happen.

Sarsgaard, who will play Milgram in an upcoming film, said researchers noticed that the closer the volunteers sat to the screaming victim, the less likely they were to continue administering the shocks. Sarsgaard said his aim in "The Killing" was to bring people closer to the reality of capital punishment.

Still, nothing has brought us there like Alinejad, the grieving mother. And no one can teach us better about the ultimate reason to stop the death penalty machine.

"I feel I'm at peace," she said later. "I feel that vengeance has left my heart."

That Abdollah's parents chose forgiveness in such a dramatic fashion gives me hope that the closer we get to the person in the noose and the more we take responsibility for the barbarity of state-sanctioned executions, the less likely we'll be to help kick out the chair.

Mike Farrell, who played B.J. Hunnicutt on the television series "MASH," is president of Death Penalty Focus, a nonprofit organization dedicated to the abolition of the death penalty.

The state of Texas on Thursday executed a man named Tommy Sells after a series of whipsawing court decisions that ultimately denied Sells his due process right to investigate whether the lethal injection met constitutional standards.

It took 30 years, but the state of Louisiana has finally figured out that it convicted — and sentenced to death — an innocent man. Fortunately for Glenn Ford, the state never got around to carrying out the execution. Though it has cost him 30 years of his life.

A burst of thunderstorm activity across the Chicago area on Sunday afternoon resulted in a death and multiple injuries at an event in west suburban Wood Dale, the collapse of a dome in northwest suburban Rosemont and the temporary evacuation of the music festival Lollapalooza in Grant Park downtown.